Dissection of the Nine-Tailed Fox
What the hell is this bastard?
Before she even realized it, Yuseongsin clicked her tongue inwardly.
Contrary to their reputation in the world, a nine-tailed fox was by no means a weak monster.
And this had nothing to do with mere illusions or hexes.
Even setting aside the bewitching charm that had earned her kind the name "dream demons of the East," the raw physical abilities of a gumiho were outstanding by any measure.
After all, she could pierce a Dragon King's scales and sink her teeth into its throat.
Nothing had changed now, either.
Strength. Roughly even between them.
Speed. Including reflexes and raw quickness, the beast that was Yuseongsin held a decisive lead.
Defense. The man's armor looked decent enough, but he couldn't outmatch a monster whose very flesh and bone were weapons.
In nearly every category of pure physical capability, Yuseongsin had the advantage.
Combining those facts, she reached a conclusion.
I can't lose……!!
Their strength was on par. He was no pushover, but if she had to compare, she held the edge.
She outclassed him in speed — to the point where she could hardly find a single area where she lagged behind.
She overwhelmed him in defense. The guard woven from yoho fur and fox magic wouldn't fall easily, even if he burned through elixirs to force his way through.
And yet, somehow, she was the one taking the hits.
Part of it was technique. The art humans called swordsmanship slipped past her beast's claws like water.
Still.
If that had been all, the advantage would have belonged to Yuseongsin, plain and simple.
Some transcendent master might have managed it, but Park Woochan's swordsmanship alone was nowhere near enough to bridge the physical gulf between them.
However.
Park Woochan was not a swordsman.
He was a hunter.
She still couldn't understand what was happening or how.
It was only today, in fact, that she'd learned her own body could move like this.
Every motion seemed to have mastered the yoho's anatomy better than she herself had.
The swinging blade. The planted footsteps.
Each tiny movement controlled and steered how the yoho could react.
Even now.
The tail and claws Yuseongsin lashed out struck against the greatsword's hilt and scattered wide.
The beast's paw rebounded away.
Her mana-laced claws raked her own tail.
And then.
Having absorbed her attack, he re-gripped the greatsword now sitting precisely where he wanted it.
At the same instant — a downward cut.
KWA-RRRRRUMBLE!!
The flashing blade vomited forth a roar of thunder.
It was the thunderclap of a wall of sound shattered at supersonic speed — a howl of steel like rolling thunder, tearing the very air apart.
And then.
Swish — a soft, chilling sound rang out.
Far too faint a noise to cling to the tail-end of that thunder.
But neither Yuseongsin nor Park Woochan missed it.
They couldn't afford to.
For Park Woochan, it was the trajectory of victory.
For Yuseongsin, it was the path to defeat.
KYAAAAAAAK!!
A scream of agony echoed across the island.
A voice like a throat being wrung dry.
Where in that pitiful body did such volume even come from?
Granted, hoping for a straight answer from the woman in question was probably a lost cause.
She'd likely just try to chop her own arm off on the spot, asking whether you could endure that.
Losing a tail had been that much of a shock.
What the hell just happened?
And it wasn't just once. It was twice.
Seven tails remained.
Which meant she had lost two-tenths of a gumiho's power.
If she fled now and devoted herself to recovery, it was an injury that would heal before long.
But.
Seven.
From behind the gas mask, where not even an expression could be read, came that flat, quiet voice.
He was counting.
Counting the tails she had left.
No — counting how many times he could still kill her.
The number that man had just uttered was, in effect, the number of lives Yuseongsin had remaining.
Grrrk — her teeth ground together.
Alarm bells ran riot through her head, screaming that she had to retreat.
And in truth, it was the wise call.
For all that a gumiho possessed power rivaling a dragon's, she had none of a dragon's pride.
In most of the old tales, their role was, after all, to coil their tails and run.
But.
Ssshhh — a strange sound reached her ears.
Just as before, she saw Park Woochan spraying some kind of substance over the severed tail.
At the same moment, she felt the tail where it touched the liquid begin to vomit up mana stained black.
She had no idea what elixir the hell it was, but the instant it met the severed tail, even the faint residual connection dissolved completely.
Like this, she couldn't recklessly run.
Even if she regrew it clumsily, the mana within that tail would never return.
Which meant she would spend her entire existence missing two-tenths of her power.
……Training. Discipline. How long would it take to rebuild two tails' worth of power through legitimate means?
Two hundred years at the absolute minimum.
Where did it all go wrong?
Where the hell did this bastard even crawl out of? Yuseongsin wanted to ask, sincerely.
The first thought to cross her mind was that A-rank hunter or whoever it was she'd killed a while back.
A gumiho had many ways of replenishing her power — her mana.
The orthodox path: cultivating virtue and raising her own rank.
Then there was the method that leaned closer to trickery: eating livers.
The liver — revered East and West as the organ of life — acted as a kind of elixir for the yoho.
Hence the tale of the fox that ate the West Sea Dragon King's liver, or the legend that consuming a hundred livers would turn one into a human.
And naturally, as with any elixir, a liver steeped in potent energy worked far better.
Say, the living liver of a high-rank hunter thick with accumulated mana.
That hunter had died for nothing more than that reason.
It wasn't as if she'd uncovered some truth no one else had glimpsed.
Call it the behavioral pattern of a pack leader — the instinct of a living creature to preserve itself and expand its territory.
To borrow Park Woochan's own analogy, you might call it the wisdom of beasts.
It was the same with seizing the Namhae Branch.
There were other circumstances, sure, but from her personal standpoint, it was exactly that simple.
She was there for the hunters' fresh livers, pure and simple.
And I haven't even laid a claw on the Association's side yet……!!
So she couldn't help but think it.
There were limits to spitting ashes over a fully cooked feast, wasn't there?
How could anyone be forced to stand and watch as a banquet laid out before their eyes was flipped over, dish by dish?
The injustice stung so badly she could cry.
Of course, Park Woochan had no way of knowing that.
Coating the severed tails with the toxin didn't take much time at all.
So instead of carefully inspecting them, Park Woochan threw himself back into the fray.
Tails came surging in from every direction.
But with two of them amputated, Yuseongsin's offense had a hole in it.
And there lay his path.
Shukuchi.
Park Woochan's body, which had charged head-on, slipped clean through the encirclement of tails.
Behind me—!
At the sensation of the fine hairs on her nape standing on end, Yuseongsin clenched her teeth.
Under normal circumstances, she would have lashed her tails in fury at such stupidity.
But not now.
There was the terror of having already surrendered two tails.
And the tails she had flung out with full force moments ago were far too heavy to call back now.
How many more would go flying while she struggled?
In the end, Yuseongsin had no choice but to wrench her body around.
At the same moment.
Huh?
Thud — his foot caught.
Not a misstep, of course.
This was a battle of desperate stakes.
As if he'd commit such an absurd blunder.
It was, naturally, Park Woochan's trick.
Half a step. By stepping just half a pace further than usual, Park Woochan seized control of the distance in a single move.
The footwork countless fighters strive for — the zone-level control of spacing that only sufficient technique and experience can achieve — made possible through pure knowledge of monsters.
The traits of the yoho species, and of the gumiho in particular.
The importance the tails carry.
The current state of having lost two of them.
The gap that loss inevitably created.
The movements a humanoid body could make.
The weight center that would necessarily shift backward.
Given all that, forcing Yuseongsin to look behind her was laughably simple.
And so — half a step. Slipped in between her legs as they hurriedly pivoted, straight into her collapsing face, came a punch, thrown because it was convenient.
At the same time, she forced her tails upright to control her body as it staggered far worse than before.
The burden of forcibly redirecting tails that had, until a heartbeat ago, been swinging at the front.
She wanted nothing more than to counterattack, but instinct — the reflex scrambling to correct her collapsing posture — piled on top of it, and—
Ah.
Tangle — two of her tails knotted together.
Not that a couple of tangled tails was a problem in itself.
And that was exactly why.
What happened next was something Yuseongsin could scarcely comprehend.
Park Woochan charged straight in — and simultaneously rode the shukuchi to seize her rear.
Immediately, he toppled the fox as she spun to face him, and while he was at it, landed another blow.
The yoho's stance crumbled.
Onto that, he added a leap bordering on emergency evasion.
His body flew out parallel to the ground, spinning in a single rotation, and a full-power slash ignited —
aimed, with exquisite coincidence, at the very two tails of Yuseongsin's that were tangled together.
The result.
Six. Five.
SHWAAAAAK!!
Blood sprayed.
Park Woochan's blade severed both knotted tails in a single stroke.
To any observer, it looked as though Yuseongsin had offered her tails up to the attack herself.
It was an art possible only for a man who understood the gumiho's anatomy, down to the last bone.
I have to run.
The conclusion came fast.
Like this, she had no choice but to admit it.
Yuseongsin the gumiho had none of a dragon's arrogance.
And yet.
She had, undeniably, let her guard down.
She might even have been underestimating him.
When she'd surrendered her first tail: panic.
When she'd surrendered her second: bewilderment.
So then.
What about the third?
She looked down at the tails lopped off in one clean, brutal sweep.
Having lost the better part of her power, Yuseongsin could no longer deny it.
This wasn't a man she merely couldn't beat in close combat.
This man was a rank above her……!!
The next instant, mana came swirling around the yoho's body.
She couldn't win while clumsily camouflaged in human shape.
At the very least, she had to shed this unfamiliar human form — that was her judgment.
Idiot.
It wasn't the wrong call.
Merely.
In this exact situation, it was the worst possible choice.
The mana surged.
At best, one second — that was all Yuseongsin needed to reclaim her true form.
And.
Under these conditions, Park Woochan was confident he could butcher her within that second.
Four.
And in fact, that's exactly what happened.
With a sharp crack, one of the tails mid-transformation back to her true form snapped.
Park Woochan hadn't cut it.
Quite the opposite.
He fired the rivets mounted on his gauntlet, pinning one tail to the ground, fixing it in place.
Once that was done, there was no need to cut through the back at all.
The force anchoring the tail to the earth, and the force pulling it toward her true form.
Like a rubber band yanked from both ends, the tail quivered helplessly between the two.
And then, with a sound that made the skin crawl, the tail tore free of Yuseongsin's body entirely.
A suicidal act — gumiho-like, or perhaps you'd call it polymorph-like.
Of course, Park Woochan didn't stop there.
The instant he nailed the tail to the earth, he threw himself forward again.
Like a high jumper clearing the bar, the hunter soared clean over Yuseongsin's head.
And in Park Woochan's eyes, the tails — only four of them left now — came into full view.
Camouflage, mimicry, whatever pretty names you used — in the end, it was nothing more than shapeshifting.
So consider, then, the reverse.
If you found yourself forced to transform into an eagle, how would people normally go about it?
Nine times out of ten, they'd turn their mouth into a beak and their arms into wings.
What pervert on God's green earth would turn their ass into a beak and their mouth into feathers?
Nobody. Absolutely nobody.
The gumiho was no different.
Shapeshifting, after all, is an art that grows harder the further the target form strays from the original — in every age, in every land.
Forelegs into hands. Hind legs into feet.
She would certainly have transformed that way.
Even old Darwin himself would have said the same.
Which meant.
Naturally, the position of the tails could be read as well.
Roughly one second until the mimicry broke down.
Park Woochan gripped the auxiliary handle of his greatsword.
And then.
Three. Two. One.
SWISH-SWISH-SWISH-SWISH-SWISH-SWISH-SWISH-SWISH-SWISH-SWISH-SWISH-SWISH!!
The next moment, Yuseongsin found herself still in human form, collapsed on the ground.
The mimicry hadn't been released.
To put it precisely — it couldn't be released.
Even the bare minimum of mana required to wield the unraveling technique had run bone-dry.
He opened the saw and gnawed through the tails.
He gouged out with a chisel, excising the roots of the tails from the fox's body.
He ran the plane along them, peeling back the skin and dragging the tailbones out whole.
He swung the blade, hooked the yoho's tail, and sheared it off in one pull.
The complete repertoire of butchery — literally every technique for dismantling the monster before his eyes.
It was an artistry that fell nothing short of mastery.
……It was a far cry from flashy technique, but this was what a hunter's method had always been.
Tailor the dissection to the specimen before you, and dissect it — literally.
More than any signature move, these were the tools Park Woochan truly relied on.
And so.
At last, all that remained before him was a single yoho that had lost ninety percent of her mana.
W-wait!!
Yuseongsin stretched her palm out toward him.
The sight of her kicking up dirt in a frantic scramble was the very picture of desperation.
It couldn't be helped, perhaps.
How terrifying must a hunter advancing on you look, with nine-tenths of your strength gone?
And yet, Yuseongsin still had her confidence.
Confidence that she could survive.
She had lost her power.
She couldn't even return to her true form — the loss was that catastrophic.
Frankly, she couldn't overpower him anymore.
But something still remained.
Not to put too fine a point on it — her beauty.
C-can you not hear me telling you to stop?!
But Park Woochan did not stop.
Heavy footsteps rang across the ridges of Gwisusan.
It seemed that fight, too, was finally winding down over there.
Not his problem, Park Woochan thought, like a man watching someone else's house fire.
Th-then!! Are you not curious?! Why I did all this?!
"Not really."
Wh-what then?! Is there truly nothing you desire?! The wisdom of the fox, the strength of the yoho — do you not want them?!
Even at his heartless answer, the fox goddess's eyes only glittered brighter.
So much the better.
Far better than a moment ago, when not a single word reached him.
She scraped the mana remaining in her humanoid body down to the dregs and layered the power of fascination onto the tip of her tongue.
Yoseol — the bewitching power of charming words.
……She still couldn't grasp what had happened or how.
Only.
One certainty: if she stayed like this, nothing but death waited for her.
The acrid scent of death spurred the fox goddess onward.
If not, then how about a woman?! If you desire it, I am yours — feast your eyes on me as you please! I dare swear it: this body is the greatest beauty under heaven! You, who slew Yuseongsin in human form — take me as your wife……!
And.
Tap — at last, Park Woochan's footsteps stopped.
Color bloomed unbidden across Yuseongsin's face.
But.
As it happened, there was exactly one reason Park Woochan had stopped.
The yoho had stepped into his range.
H-how is it?
"Sylvester doesn't negotiate."
……?
"This blade cuts whatever monster stands in front of it."
Wait, what the hell is a Sylvester, you weaboo bas—
She never got the words out.
Because.
The very next moment, the fox goddess's severed head was sailing up into the sky.
Right up until the end, her face had never once imagined it might be her own death arriving.
Having lost the better part of her power, the gumiho couldn't even properly register the blade the hunter swung — and her death was over in a single instant.
And so.
The tale of the moving island that had shaken the countless isles of the South Sea came, somehow, to a close.